Biography

Jill Didur, Ph.D. English (York University) is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Concordia University. A specialist in postcolonial Anglophone literature and theory, Dr. Didur’s research has focused on a wide variety of related areas including, locative media, historical memory, partition narratives and secular discourse in South Asian, colonial and postcolonial travel writing, ecocriticism, landscape and garden studies, diasporic literature and culture, and globalisation. She is the author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (U of T Press, 2006, & Pearson Longman, South Asia, 2007). She is the co-editor of special issues of Cultural Critique: Critical Posthummanism (2003) and /Cultural Studies: Revisiting the Subaltern in the New Emmpire (2003). She is a member of the Concordia research axis of Figura, le Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire and she serves on the editorial boards of ARIEL: A Review of International Literature in English, Postcolonial Text, and Topia: Journal of Canadian Cultural Studies and the executive of the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS). She has been awarded fellowships and research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, and Le Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture.

Biography

I am an Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature, with a specialization in British Romantic literature. After earning a D.Phil. at Oxford and a period as Research Associate at the Northrop Frye Centre, University of Toronto, I joined the Département d’études anglaises at the Université de Montréal in June 2001. My publications include two dozen articles and essays on Romantic authors in such journals as European Romantic Review, Byron Journal, Keats-Shelley Journal, and Keats-Shelley Review. Routledge published my monograph, Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene, in 2005. Much of my work has been editorial and collaborative. I am the editor of Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner (Macmillan, 2000), and one of the general editors of the six-volume edition of The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt (Pickering & Chatto, 2003).

Projects

Remapping Leigh Hunt’s Literary WorldThis new project will explore Leigh Hunt’s place within London’s literary scene throughout his lifetime with an approach combining traditional literary studies and digital humanities.

Queering Film Adaptations, 1816-2005This project deals with a range of interpretations of seven novels published between 1816 and 2005 through the medium of cinema and queer theory to engage with theoretical issues of adaptation and sexuality. Authors to be discussed include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Patricia Highsmith, Christopher Isherwood, Monique Proulx, and Michael Cunningham.

Leigh Hunt as Victorian Writer, 1830-1860This SSHRC-funded project takes up Hunt’s life and career after 1828 until the publication of the second edition of his Autobiography in 1860, a year after his death in 1859. A sequel to my first monograph Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene, this project will be accompanied by an electronic edition of Hunt’s 1840 play A Legend of Florence, and his 1860 Autobiography.

“Technologies, Media, and Representations in Nineteenth-Century France and England”I am the team leader of the FQRSC-funded research project ‘Technologies, Media, and Representations in Nineteenth-Century France and England’. The two years of funding from the Soutien aux équipes de recherche – Équipe en émergence program allowed for a series of informal meetings and four 2-day workshops between 2009 and 2011 for all the members of our team (17 researchers from Canada, the US, and the UK).

Biography

Ursula K. Heise is Professor of English, a 2011-12 Guggenheim Fellow, and Immediate Past President of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). Her research and teaching focus on contemporary environmental culture, literature and art in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan; theories of globalization; literature and science; and the digital humanities. Her books includeChronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur [After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture] (Suhrkamp in 2010 (English to follow).

Projects

She is currently working on a book entitled Where the Wild Things Used To Be: Narrative, Database, and Biodiversity Loss.